Figure 1.

Slime defends hagfish against predator attacks. (a) Sequence of events during a predator attack (adapted from Zintzen et al. [8]). On being attacked, the hagfish produces a large quantity of slime that chokes the predator. The process of secretion and slime creation took less than 0.4 s. (b) Slime is formed from the secreted biomaterial, in part containing prolate-shaped skeins. (c) A skein unravels under the hydrodynamic forces from the surrounding flow field and produces a micrometre-width fibre of length 10–15 cm. (d) The unravelled fibres and mucous vesicles entrain a large volume of water to form a cohesive network. Details on materials and microscopy are provided in the electronic supplementary material, section I. (Online version in colour.)